An ancestral tomb thousands of years old

The stone cist grave on the Hartberg near Schankweiler was erected around 3000 BC, in the Late Neolithic period, and may have been used for over a thousand years. Many generations of farming families living nearby buried their dead here. The tomb, which is visible from afar and is made of sandstone slabs and blocks, was probably originally covered by a stone mound.

The tomb consists of two chambers. The main chamber is approximately 2 x 1.2 m in size, with walls made of upright stone slabs and an upright sandstone block. It was probably also covered with stone slabs. Only the lower half of the vertical stone slab between the main chamber and the antechamber has survived. Its once circular opening of around 70 cm in diameter was the closable entrance to the burial chamber.

In later times, people no longer showed the tomb on the hilltop much respect. Its stone slabs were used to build a house right next to the tomb in the early Iron Age, between around the 8th and 6th centuries BC, and during the Roman period or the Middle Ages, ashlars were quarried for building purposes on the rocky outcrop that forms the western wall of the burial chamber.

Neolithic people believed in life after death and gave the deceased a few things - clay pots, perhaps filled with food and drink, tools and weapons - and many objects from the Schankweiler grave were later scattered in the surrounding area. Remains of human bones and shards of clay vessels were found in the burial chamber, as well as flint knives and arrowheads, part of a stone axe and other vessel remains outside the chamber, and archaeologists also found an elongated stone stele inside the tomb. It may have been placed in the chamber or crowned the stone mound that probably once covered the grave.

The stone cist grave near Schankweiler is the only visible Neolithic collective grave in Rhineland-Palatinate to date.

The stone cist grave is located on the Klausnerweg hiking trail in the NaturwanderPark delux.